A University of Bath study of a two-year pilot run by UK charity Cool Earth found that giving 211 Indigenous Asháninka people in Peru roughly £2 a day — no strings attached — produced measurable gains in both human welfare and forest protection. Nearly 90% of participants adopted environmentally beneficial practices including collective reforestation and restoration of water sources. Food insecurity among households dropped from 73% to 26%. The mechanism is straightforward and worth naming clearly: economic desperation drives deforestation. When households cannot feed themselves, they log, burn, or leave. The share of participants forced to migrate for work fell from 43% to 18%, meaning more people stayed on the land they are better positioned than anyone else to protect. Remove the desperation, and the rational choice shifts from extraction to stewardship. This is the first unconditional basic income trial targeting an Indigenous Amazon community, distinguishing it from Brazil's conditional transfer programmes like Bolsa Família (education requirements) and Bolsa Verde (conservation requirements). The unconditional design, co-developed with local women's groups, is philosophically and practically distinct: it treats communities as agents rather than compliance targets. A voluntary "cash plus" education component on finance, conservation, and climate change complemented the transfers. The study's limitations are real and the authors acknowledge them. The trial covered just over 500 hectares of forest and 211 people across three communities. Researchers did not measure changes in vegetation or soil quality, nor did they control for other projects operating in the same area. The two-year timeframe is too short to establish whether behavioural changes persist once payments stop — or what happens when they scale. Critics raise a legitimate counterpoint: cash transfers in other Amazon contexts have funded motorbike and car purchases, increasing demand for roads and accelerating deforestation. Reports also link city visits for cash collection to increased drug exposure in Indigenous communities. The relationship between cash and conservation is not monotonically positive, and the direction depends heavily on local context, community governance, and what alternatives exist. The wider policy stakes are significant. International recognition of Indigenous land stewardship as a climate tool is growing, but the funding and incentive mechanisms remain contested. This pilot feeds a "cash-for-conservation" network of civil society organisations looking for alternatives to top-down conditional programmes. The question is whether the mechanism that worked at 211 people and 500 hectares can survive contact with the political economy of scale — where larger sums attract rent-seekers, intermediaries, and government capture. Lead author Dr Neil Howard frames the result as "very pioneering" while conceding the need for much larger trials. Co-author Dr Nick Langridge argues the data supports a simple thesis: security and autonomy enable stewardship. If that thesis holds at scale, the implications for global conservation finance are substantial. If it doesn't, the pilot joins a long list of small experiments that worked precisely because they were small.
